From Data Chaos to Actionable Intelligence: How the Convergence of the GeoWeb and Semantic Web is Revolutionizing the Way We Process Information

The U.S. Government has always been an early adopter of geospatial technologies—from GPS to satellite imagery. Even the first application of the GeoWeb, Keyhole/Google Earth, received the bulk of its early support from government investment and customers. New geospatial innovations continue to be driven by government investment and will be a key resource driving the success of the GeoWeb.

GeoCommons is one example of government investment and partnerships driving dual use of GeoWeb technology. The creation of GeoCommons was intended to open up more of the world’s geographic data for analysis and collaboration by a community of non-technical users. This talk will discuss how the tradeoff between government and consumer-driven requirements have influenced technology choices for GeoCommons; some resulting in failure and some success. Specifically how GeoCommons evolved to deal with:

1) How to manage and scale 70,000 plus layers of growing structured data;

2) How to integrate and federate large quantities of structured and unstructured data on the GeoWeb; and

3) How to build a metadata model that enables semantic meaning across disparate data objects.

The talk will conclude with a discussion of how the GeoWeb’s democratization of geospatial data and analysis creates opportunities to increase the public’s access to information and enhance national security—two goals that are often in conflict.